In Missouri and neighboring states, tornadoes are common. The first lesson that continues to inspire her is to prepare for emergency responses before emergencies strike. The course runs the gamut of all the activities that are within the scope of environmental health response.”ĮHTER Principles Guide Emergency Responseīennett captures well the specific EHTER lessons that trained her for the tornado response. “They do not have the dramatic search and rescue role, but without them, how do you get things back to normal? How do you make things safe?” She adds, “EHTER gives students access to all the jobs environmental health practitioners can do in disasters-from supervising tetanus shots to manning shelters during an ice storm. “Environmental health workers are vital in disasters,” she says. It wasn’t long before Bennett recognized how essential environmental public health practice is. Because no emergency response positions were open, she accepted a job as a public health inspector, first in Arkansas and a year later in Missouri. She began her career with an emergency response internship in her home state of Arkansas, hoping to move into a job when her internship was over. As an environmental health practitioner in the Springfield-Greene County Health Department (HD), Bennett was part of the emergency response to the nearby 2011 Joplin, MO, tornado that killed 160 people, wounded over 1000 and left a ¾ mile path of destruction.Įnvironmental Health Workers Vital in Disaster Responseīennett did not originally plan to work in environmental health. When Amanda Bennett took CDC’s Environmental Health Training in Emergency Response (EHTER) at the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Center for Domestic Preparedness (CDP) in Anniston, AL in 2010, she had no idea that she would be putting these lessons to good use in a year’s time-almost in her own back yard. There’s some really intense footage from storm chaser Jeff Piotraski of the Joplin tornado as it happened.įirst person audio from inside a gas station hit by the tornado in Joplin.Environmental health staff from Springfield-Greene County Health Department who responded to Joplin tornado include, from left to right, front: Lisa Brenneman, Laura Wingo middle: Sarah Limb, Amanda Bennett, Roxanne Sharp back: Cathy Johnson, Tom Flowers, Eric Marcol. I also recommend reading the first hand account of ER Physician Kevin Kikta who was working in the Joplin Hospital when it was hit by the tornado. Please consider donating to one of the Joplin relief funds if you have any extra money to spare, they still need help! I’d say about 50% of the houses had now been cleared of debris and leveled to their foundations, but the town is still in a complete state of disarray and there is LOTS of work to be done. I stopped there again on my way back from California to see how much progress had been made. In fact after seeing all of this it made me feel a little guilty for ever staging any of my photographs to look “post-apocalyptic”.īelow is a series of images I captured in Joplin on June 11th and July 28th, 2011. Cars were flipped over, roofs collapsed, personal belongings scattered everywhere, total devastation. Once we passed a certain point though virtually every building as far as I could see had been completely leveled. At first it was your typical American small town, storefronts and strip malls….not many signs of destruction. No television clip or image can do justice to what I saw when we exited the highway and drove towards Joplin. I’d seen horrifying footage on the news of the tornado aftermath but once highway exits for Joplin started popping up, I decided that I had to see it myself. One of the main routes westward on I-40 weaves through the Midwest and right past Joplin. It turned out to be the deadliest tornado to hit the United States since 1947.ģ weeks after the tornado hit I was headed on a road trip across the country from Chicago to Los Angeles. Thousands of homes were completely destroyed and 158 people lost their lives. The one-mile wide cyclone created wind gusts of up to 250mph. Late in the afternoon on May 22nd, 2011 a devastating EF5 multiple-vortex tornado struck Joplin, Missouri.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |